Slashdot Mirror
SuSE 'Name-the-Mascot' Contest is Over
radja writes: "The SuSE chameleon has a new name: Geeko. E-mail to the winners was sent yesterday, so if you joined the contest, check your mail."
Radja was pleasantly surprised to receive such mail, and looks forward to getting a plush Geeko and the coming 6.4 distro. Check out the results on the SuSE news page.
SUSE - Geeko Mozilla's layout engine: Gecko Hmm...
marotti.com
They should have called it Karma.
What's idiomatic German for "geek" (in the "tech-loving" sense, not the "circus" sense) ?
"Oh, I hope he doesn't give us halyatchkies," said Heinrich.
But the lizard depicted in the logo is a chameleon. "geeko" is meant to be like "gecko" and that's NOT a gecko. :(
reminds me of "newt", the unofficial short for the newton messagepad...
:)
What does however constitute a good mascot name for a piece of software??
should it be cool, simple or cute??
seems like the opensource/linux comunity is collecting cute mascots (with tux offcourse being my favourite...)
One positive side of cute mascots, are that it makes it so much easier to get your girlfriend agree to have nerd merchendise laying around
You know that movie with Charlie Sheen and his son and Michael Douglas (Wall Street?)
I know the spelling is wrong but thats what I saw when I first saw the name.
Bad choice. It wreaks of greed.
I'm still working on a clever footer.
Geek-o? ;-)
I would think that this would be a gross oversight and the name be reconsidered.
pronoblem
'cos with open source you can see right inside baby!
.oO0Oo.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Ever since I read Linus' explanation why he chose the Penguin or what the mascott should look like, I can't help but keep thinking of Tux as happy in just-got-laid-happy.
This won't work with Geeko, I think...
-- "Tradition is the illusion of permanence."
geeko was his nameo
Or, perhaps, if they're really smart, they'll make him into a geek pocket protector, so that he's peering over the top of a pocket, with a couple holes for pens, a small LCD/clock oriented upwards, 4MB of RAM for MP3s and of course, a hole small enough to be reserved for a stylus. They could give these away at the next Linux World.
We seem to heave a dearth of "cool" (to the masses) mascots. Sure, there's Tux, but then there's also the dude in the red fedora. Geeko falls somewhere in the middle for me. We need more Tux-like creatures. Maybe Susie coulda been a girlfriend for him or something. Don't get me wrong, I'm a geek and proud of it. But I'd like to see what would happen with Tux, Susie (if they had made that the mascot) and the BSD Daemon if they got together and partied. The possibilities are limitless!
as in Suse + Linux = Sux...
I thought it was funny.
There are many reasons why this is a horrible name...
First of all, it is only natural to assume that "Geeko" is a play on the words "geek" and "gecko". This would be great, except that THE LOGO IS NOT A FREAKIN' GECKO!!! OK? HOW MANY TIMES DO WE HAVE TO TELL YOU IDIOTS!!! IT IS A CHAMELEON!!! This makes absolutely no sense.. Do we call the Linux penguin "Ducky"? NO, that would be absolutely ridiculous, because it is OBVIOUSLY not a duck!! It's a penguin!!!
I'm sorry, but I would never consider using a linux distribution if the developers don't even know what kind of animal their logo is. This just makes them look stupid, and it makes the linux community look stupid.
Besides, I hate the whole linux-geek association.
Websters 1913 unabridged:
Note: Its color changes more or less with the color of the objects about it, or with its temper when disturbed.
cheese
Blah. I think they should have just called it "SuSE" (pronounced "sooz", not "susie"). Heck, they even said that that "Suse" or "Suze" is a German female name! I think it would have been perfect, and would be appropriate because of SuSE's country-of-origin and strong following among European Linuxers. "Geeko" is just a horrible pun (and an incorrect one because it's not a freakin' gecko!).
They may regret this. Now it will be known as "Gecko Linux". SuSE had better add "gecko" to the meta-keywords on their homepage, or they're going to lose customers to other companies -- like Red Hat, whose mascot is... a red hat! See, simple is good!
Heh, there's a SuSE banner ad at the top of my page. The poor little chameleon... damned to a life of having a bad name, because of some dumb contest! :-(
I am the Lord.
I am the Lord.
God Hates Moderators.
Somebody's got to have some coffee around here somewhere. -me in the morning.
Martin is the father, Charlie is the kid.
cheese
That was great.
i like the name... too bad i didn't come up with it... and the price would have been mine... what's the price anyway?
Well I've never seen a penguin that looked like tuxedo (or a pink torpedo for that matter).
And if we called the penguin "Ducky" that would actually be pretty funny. No one would mistake a penguin for a duck, so it is funny.
I agree with geeko being an awful name. I suggested "Joe"
cheese
On the other hand, I think that they'll honestly regret calling it Geeko. I think that's going to be a "one-day wonder". By this time tomorrow, I suspect few (if any) will use that name. Anyone who uses a name at all will use their own.
Personally, I think the mascot looks more like a piece of "ancient world" art, and a name that reflected longevity would do much better than a slang term that's already out-dated and passing into oblivion.
(How many IT Department employees are still called the Backroom Boys? Boffins? Egg-heads? Nerds are now a type of candy, and Geek is over-due for the dustbin.)
Hey, this leads me into a REAL "name-the" competition. What should above-average tech folk be called? If all the older terms are either dead as a doornail, sexist, or both, what would be a great, collective way to describe such people?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Geeko.. interesting. YOu all know of course this is going to go downhill, into all sorts of ugly marketing wars now.. Perhaps we can have a Distro mascot fighting game, or even a popular japanese cartoon ripoff, Distromon. "Mozillarian, i choose you." I can see it now. Linux breakfast cerial? im not holding my breath.. marshmellow kernels and Korn puffs. And of course on the back, besides only telling you the ingrediants, they tell you how to make the cerial, and give you a place to post improvements...
Fire up your copy of Tux A Quest for Herring with the right command line argument and instead of Tux you get his girlfriend, Gown.
Which doesn't rule out Susie as a girlfriend, I have no preconceptions about penguin polygamy or polyandry.
p.s. I have a beanie baby named Munchie that looks much more like the Suse chameleon logo then their 'plush toy'. Although the Beanie people had already named it 'Rainbow', which is a stupid name for a chameleon.
I have that same one, and you're right on both counts: the name "rainbow" is dumb, but it looks exactly like SuSE (I will not call it "Geeko"!) It's too bad SuSE can't get a licensing deal, like the Toronto Blue Jays did. Alas, that would cost megabucks, which I'm not sure SuSE has.
Munchie is a nice name though. :-)
I am the Lord.
I am the Lord.
God Hates Moderators.
I believe I speak for everyone when I say: UGH
First of all it's a chameleon not a gecko. And it's putrid for so many other reasons. They should have called it "hey we're smoking powdered drain cleaner again"
Other Failed SuSE Mascot Names
*Dorko
*Nerdo
*David Hasslehoff (already taken)
*Phil, the Pants Lizard
*Monica
Barf! Puke! Hurl! Spewosity Up-throw!
I don't believe it. How crap a name could you possibly have thought of? So crap it could only have been thought of by Mr. Crap, of 43 Crapston Terrace, Crappytown, Crapshire in the land of Crap.
What a dumb name...
"Information wants to be paid"
One wonders if we will now see a variation on those Geico auto insurance TV ads. "I am Geeko, mascot for SuSE Linux, not to be confused with Geico, the auto insurance company that can save you blah blah blah... So please stop calling me asking how to recompile your Linux kernel!"
I think the name geeko is very appropriate for SuSE. Their logo and their marketing needs lots of improvement, so I was quite sure they'd find some stupid name for the ugly mascot. I am surprised that the name is not "susi" or "suzy" or so...
It is the German equivalent of antidisestablishmentarian, simply the longest word in the language.
The 'Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaft' was the 'Danube steamship company', an Austrian company that closed down 2 or 3 years ago after having existed for over 100 years. As to the 'kapitän' bit, you got it.
Mielipiteet omiani - Opinions personal, facts suspect.
Pathetic. They went with an overly gratuitous techfashion catch-phrase. They'd be well advised to give out the prizes and do the contest all over again.
They call me the working man. I guess that's what I am.
See subject.
Jailbrekr
Feed The Need[goatse.cx]
And anyways, what kind of connotations do they want with their name? Yeah, sure, the gekkonidae are fast, agile, and can climb any obstacle, but for reptiles they're really, really noisy. Much better the connotations of family Chamaleonidae, known for fragility in captivity, imitation, 'conspicuous ornamentation', and... well...
...They're good at catching bugs... and doesn't "Elly" or "Elea" or "Leonid" sound much better? (or Chum or Susy or Rutabaga or really just about anything else?) Where is SuSE's sense of esthetics? Come one, it sounds like "eek!" Why would anyone want something that sounds like...oh. never mind.
I have to admit, SuSE started to care about an easier installation pretty late. Even the character based Yast (1) installation was/is needlessly complex (no workflow!). Our development team thought, installation is just once, but you use the system for a long time, and that's where most of the energy was spend: inside.
While I haven't tried it myself, I've heard a lot of good things about the new version of Yast II that's going to be on SuSE Linux 6.4 - from installation supporters, those guys that I really believe, because they have to suffer first when something doesn't work.
Anyway, I still think we've got a lot to offer, not just size (amount of packages). The best thing for servers will be the pair LVM (logical volume manager) and journaling reiserfs in 6.4. The advantage of journaling is well-known, and for those who don't know, with an LVM you can enlarge partitions on the fly (by adding hard disks and having a virtual partition as a volume group), and with reiserfs you can actually really use this LVM stuff without reformating (ext2 filesystems cannot grow). That's very, very good for servers!
--
Michael Hasenstein
http://www.suse.de/~mha/
This is not a troll or flamebait. I respect SuSE. I really do. Anyone who can win a landwar in Europe the way they have against RedHat has to be doing something right.
With that said, I must now vent against SuSE's mascot, which to me (and lots of other people, I assume) looks like a green turd with legs and a face. Everyone knows Shakespeare's quote that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, and most people know the common variation on that quote about excrement smelling just as sweet, and I for one find it quite appropos here.
RedHat's shadowman is somehow mysterious. Tux is adorable. The idea of a chameleon has a lot of promise, both for its symbolism and because it has a lot of untapped cuteness-value that could be unearthed and exploited (and maybe plush stuffed-animals is a step in the right direction). But please, SuSE, give the lizard a makeover.
And lest anyone think it's just a crappy slashdot rendition, here's the actual logo from SuSE's website).
For comparison, an actual green chameleon from Kenya. Real chameleons are adroit climbers and skillful hunters with long strong muscular legs. SuSE's chameleon is perched on two pairs of stubby little legs (grossly out of proportion with the rest of its body) and sadly looks like it's about to fall over and die from asphyxiation like a sheep lying on its back. SuSE's chameleon wouldn't have a chance in hell of surviving in the wild (compared with, say, Tux as portrayed on extremelinux.com), which is not the message that we'd like to send about SuSE's distribution in particular or about Linux in general.
And as for the name, that issue's been beaten to death already. Alas, crappy ideas never die in the minds of marketers.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
> I believe I speak for everyone when I say: UGH
:-)
It's better than Nerdo or Spoddo...
Though following the "new" German orthography it should be Donaudampfschiffarhrtsgesellschaftskapitän .
e roffizier in some Donald-Duck-comic...
while we're at the topic, a long long time ago I came across the famous Zweihunderttausendbruttoregistertonnenöltankerunt
-- "Tradition is the illusion of permanence."
I have a beanie baby named Munchie that looks much more like the Suse chameleon logo then their 'plush toy'.
Check out a picture of the SuSE doll at this link:
http://www.suse.de /en/news/news/newproduct/chamaeleon/index.html
It really does look horrid.
I am the Lord.
I am the Lord.
God Hates Moderators.
Too bad...My suggestion was Klaus-Dieter Von dem Ast. Klaus-Dieter is a nerdy German name--possibly given by FDP-voting parents and Von dem Ast is a play on the literal translation "from the branch", as such creatures hang out on tree branches. But "Von dem X" is also in the form of an old royalty title, as the nobility were always "From X" or "From the X" instead of a name that suggested a trade. But such obvious ironic hilarity goes right by most Germans. Now that I've explained it, most English-speakers are rolling on the ground laughing. But the Germans? Noooo....
--- WWSD? What Would Strider Do?
The fruit of such relations against nature would be forbidden.
--
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu